Toulouse shooting: Will Sarkozy prove to be the leader the nation needs?

As France stops for a painful moment of soul-searching, the President is
determined to show his strength.

The stage was set this week for the feverish final countdown to France’s presidential elections – now just a month away and looking less and less like a foregone conclusion. Instead, the campaign of an apparently racist and anti-Semitic serial murderer has stunned the country into aggrieved silence, foisting on politicians and society a painful and unexpected moment of reflection about the state of the nation.

Yesterday was supposed to mark the official launch of the presidential campaign, after which the 10 candidates who have mustered the required backing of 500 mayors must by law be accorded the same broadcasting air time. After weeks of hogging the limelight, the big hitters – Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative incumbent; François Hollande, his Socialist rival; and Marine Le Pen of the far-Right National Front (FN) – can now be given no more coverage than anti-capitalist crusader Philippe Poutou or Jacques Cheminade, an oddball who wants to colonise Mars, compares Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, and believes the West will be saved only if it teaches choral music to all three-year-olds.

But this year’s cast of extras is still waiting in the wings and the campaign is effectively on hold as the nation mourns seven dead: three paratroopers killed last week – two Muslim, one of West Indian descent – and four Jews, three of them children, murdered in cold blood outside a school in Toulouse on Monday.

Before tragedy struck, many in France had complained that the presidential campaign was failing to address society’s deep concerns about record unemployment, the sluggish economy and France’s place in the world, descending instead into cynical populism, facile sniping and the courting of extremists. A pugnacious Sarkozy was accused by rivals of brazenly gunning for the far-Right vote by claiming France has “too many foreigners”, urging that the labelling of halal and kosher meat should become a national priority and threatening to pull the country out of Europe’s borderless Schengen zone unless lax countries tightened up their borders.

After claiming to have “de-demonised” the far-Right, Marine Le Pen recently reverted to her traditional anti-immigrant fundamentals to catch Sarkozy. Speaking in Ajaccio on Saturday, she blasted a “dictatorship of minorities” seeking to impose its “content on school manuals”. “They’ve got rid of Henri IV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Clovis. They’ve replaced them with the history of Mali,” she claimed, before hammering home her pledge to end welfare for foreigners.

Then came the horrific attack of the scooter-riding killer, who calmly entered a school playground, grabbed a seven-year-old girl and shot her in the head. It now appears he may have filmed the murders with an extreme sports camera, perhaps inspired by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Leaving precious few forensic clues behind, the gunman is still on the loose and police warn that unless stopped he may strike again in the next few days. For the first time in history, France has imposed the maximum scarlet alert level on the south-west, a category reserved for imminent threats of terror attacks.

Against this backdrop, the candidates initially displayed a united front. Sarkozy was the first to announce that he was putting his campaign on hold until today, declaring from the crime scene: “Barbarism, savagery, cruelty cannot win. Hate cannot win.” Yesterday, the President told pupils at a Paris school: “It could have happened here. It’s serious, so serious that it concerns the whole republic.” Marine Le Pen refrained from comment, saying it was not the time for campaigning.

But as schoolchildren around the country marked a minute of silence for the dead, politics quickly resurfaced. Mired in record low popularity ratings, Sarkozy has made small but significant gains on Mr Hollande in the past week, overtaking him to claim pole position in forecast votes for round one of the election on April 22. He is, however, still forecast to lose the May 6 run-off resoundingly to the unassuming Socialist, whose popularity is largely based on mass anti-Sarkozy sentiment and a squeeze-the-rich agenda.

To catch up with Hollande in round two, Sarkozy needs FN sympathisers to transfer their votes to him, without turning away the centre ground. Images of Sarkozy as a unifying president at a time of national trauma might bridge the gap, according to Brice Teinturier, of the pollsters Ipsos. “In moments of extreme violence, the powers that be have real legitimacy,” he says. Sensing the political danger of allowing Sarkozy to shoulder the nation’s suffering alone, Hollande also rushed off to the site of the Toulouse shootings, took part in remembrance ceremonies and is now shadowing his rival every step of the way.

Few dispute that Sarkozy is in his element at a time of crisis. With that in mind, his early campaign strategy was to style himself as the captain of a “strong France”, the only figure capable of steering the country out of the euro-debt crisis, while Hollande was a mere “pedal boat captain”. The receding threat of euro implosion took the sting out of that tactic and led to a series of opposition spoofs of Sarkozy as the hapless captain of a foundering Costa Concordia-style France.

This week’s tragedy may well remind the French of an earlier episode in Sarkozy’s career that first brought him to public attention. In 1993, while mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France’s richest town, Sarkozy walked unarmed into a classroom and personally negotiated the release of children held hostage by a deranged man with an explosive belt, in what became known as the “human bomb” drama. It helped create the alpha male image that would eventually win Sarkozy massive popular support as France’s tough-talking interior minister in 2002-04 and 2005-07.

But he will have a tough time changing the impression among many that he has inflamed tensions in France during his mandate, with initiatives such as a lame national identity debate, cracking down on Roma gypsies and controversially linking immigration and crime in a speech in Grenoble.

Yesterday, Hollande homed in on this point. “There are words that influence, that penetrate, that liberate [prejudice]. Those who have positions of responsibility must control their vocabulary.”

Centrist François Bayrou went even further, squarely accused Sarkozy of stoking divisions and prejudices within French society. “There’s a degree of violence and stigmatisation in French society that’s growing, it’s unacceptable,” he said. “Statesmen have a duty to ensure that these tensions, passions and hatreds always be kept under control.”

Sarkozy was even accused of milking emotions during a speech to secondary school children, when he told them: “The killer went for a little girl, I want you to think about that.” In a Twitter reaction, ecologist Cécile Duflot said: “I think, Mr President, that one does not speak like that to children. The duty of adults is to protect, not stress [them]”.

If this week’s murders in part decide Sarkozy’s future, it would not be the first time that an unexpected act of violence has changed the course of a French presidential campaign. In 1988, militants on the island of Ouvéa, New Caledonia, took 27 people hostage in a cave, demanding independence from France. Jacques Chirac, then prime minister, ordered an assault of the cave, authorised by incumbent Socialist president Francois Mitterrand just two days before the run-off between the two. Nineteen hostage takers and two soldiers were killed. Chirac gave his “warmest congratulations” to the military, despite the bloodbath. Mitterrand, who decried a “painful death toll”, ended up winning.

Then in 2002, an unemployed gunman killed eight local politicians in Nanterre, leading Chirac to accuse his Socialist rival Lionel Jospin of failing to clamp down on violence and insecurity. Three days before the first round of elections, the TV channel TF1 led its news broadcasts with the bruised face of a pensioner beaten up in his home. The emphasis on security is said to have helped the FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to knock Jospin out in round one, leading to Chirac’s victory.

Unlike 2002, the appalling murders of this week are likely to soften candidates’ discourse, according to political analyst Dominique Reynié. “What will change in the campaign is the violent tone. We will as a result be able to discuss real issues,” he says. “I think that politicians who fail to respect that change of tone will be punished.”

But with the killer still on the loose, the time for calm debating has not yet come.